The Killing Fields

Inside the Wat at the killing fields.

Yesterday, we went to two places. The Killing Fields, and the high school prison where the people lived. You may remember that we went to Auschwitz, the concentration camp during WWII. This was similar. I continue to be amazed at how stupid human beings are and how cruel we can be to each other.

Note: This post is slightly graphic.

The Killing Fields were all started by the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia was in political turmoil and the Khmer Rouge took power. A man named Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and he had a new vision for Cambodia. He wanted to rebuild the country from the ground up. That means he wanted to kill anybody that had any education. Doctors, lawyers, and even people that knew a second language were killed by Pol Pot. They wanted to rebuild the country, so they evacuated the major cities, including the capital, Phnom Penh. He moved everyone into the countryside. The people were forced to work, and it gets hot here. It's the middle of winter and it's over 90 degrees all of the time. People died from starvation, and exhaustion. They didn't have the resources to farm food. Pol Pot's henchmen included little children, who didn't know better. And because they didn't know better they were very ruthless, whipping and forcing people to work.

The smarter people might have been able to figure out what was happening, so Pol Pot had them killed or imprisoned. Anybody who was anybody was also sent. Generals and officials were sent. Cambodia had around (give or take a million) 8 million people in the country and 2 million people were sent to the killing fields or to the prison. Both was a death sentence.

The sharp leaves. You can't see super well, but the black edges are very stiff.

At the killing fields they didn't mess around. The killing fields were not a prison, they were what their name says: a place to kill people. The truck pulled up, and they went right to work. The people were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their back. Bullets were too expensive, so the guards used anything they could find to kill people. Hoes, axes, sticks, and rocks were all used. They hacked people to death with them. They even used some leaves on a tree. The leaves were rigid and were able to slit throats.

They also had a tree. Their idea was to kill all of the children, so they couldn't grow up and seek revenge on the Khmer Rouge. The guard would hold the baby or small child by it's ankles, and smash their head against the tree until the child was dead. It was horrible

This is that tree, it is covered in little bracelets. I don't know what that means, but I think it's just a thing to remember them by.

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After the people were killed, they were thrown into mass graves. There were approximately 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia because of the Khmer Rouge. A mass grave is defined as 4 or more people, but some graves had up to 1,000 people in them.

These look like holes in the ground. They are really mass graves. They used to be over 15 feet deep, but they are just little dips in the ground now.

Joe on the second floor of the prison.

One of the torture rooms at S-21. We couldn't really tell
how it worked.

The torture I described in this paragraph.

The high school was a prison, named S-21, where they attempted to get information out of prisoners by torture. The prisoners sold out their relatives to escape the pain. The Khmer Rouge wanted to kill entire families, and that's what they were trying to get from the prisoners. The museum showed a lot of the torture devices, but we couldn't really figure out what they did. One torture method was to tie the prisoners' hands behind their backs and lift them up by their hands upside down. They passed out fairly quickly, and then their heads were dunked underwater. This woke them up quickly so that the torture could continue. Another was to tie down all of the limbs of a prisoner, then continuously pour water on their face. They would stretch the limbs to strange and inhuman angles. There didn't seem to be any limits, besides the torturers' imaginations.

This is Chum Mey's cell.
It was about a 3 foot by 6.

Us with Chum Mey.

Around 150 people survived the high school prison, and I don't think any survived the killing fields. But we don't know how those 150 people were afterwards. They could have died later from the torturing, or been crippled, or not even survived 24 hours. There was one, though, who survived and wrote a book. He was there selling signed copies, and so we bought one and got a picture with him. In the opening paragraphs of his book, he says, "I [Chum Mey] do not condemn the people who tortured me. . . . I consider them victims like me, because they had to follow other people's orders. How can I say I would have behaved differently? Would I have had the strength to refuse to kill, if the penalty was my own death?" To me, this really shows how horrible this time period was. It was either kill, or be killed, and you didn't have a lot of choice in the matter.

In the end, I can't believe that human beings can be so cruel. First we saw Auschwitz, and now we saw the killing fields. Both times people were tortured or killed for what? Being a Jew or resisting the government. I'm sure that these things happen other places too. If we don't learn from these mistakes, it seems to me that this will just keep happening until one day, the killing party kills everyone. We were talking about what would happen if this happened in the US. I think that the people would stand up and say something, we wouldn't allow this to happen. I think that it is our duty, as Earthlings/humans to learn about these horrible things, and speak out against them if they ever happen. These things shouldn't ever be allowed to happen again.